NEW YORK TIMES: Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88. His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.

In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism. But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious.”

It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which — like “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade” — became American idioms. His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.

“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,” Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. “His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ 57 times.” William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.” MORE

FRESH AIR: Tom Wolfe wasn’t interested in fitting in. In his signature white suit, the best-selling author and journalist described himself as “the village information gatherer.” “For me, it is much more effective to arrive in any situation as a man from Mars,” he told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross in 1987. Wolfe died Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88. Wolfe was at the vanguard of “new journalism” in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, he said, journalists were expected to assume a “neutral” or “objective” voice. “I frankly found it absolutely boring,” he said — and made “a great game and a great experiment” of using “techniques that short story writers and novelists use.” His works included The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe spoke with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross in 1987 and with Dave Davies in 2012. We remember Wolfe with excerpts from those two interviews below. MORE

]]>http://www.phawker.com/2018/05/21/rip-tom-wolfe-the-godfather-of-new-journalism/feed/0BOOKS: This Is Your Book On Drugshttp://www.phawker.com/2018/05/21/books-this-is-your-book-on-drugs/
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BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC You’re either on the bus, or off the bus, Ken Kesey chants. On the bus. Off the bus. With the Merry Pranksters. Or with the squares. On the bus. Off the bus. This phrase — a meaty reality bite all by itself, repeated like a mantra throughout the book — marks the metaphysical divide that is at the center of Tom Wolfe’s raw account of the psychedelic counterculture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the legendary New Journalism chronicle of Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest) and the Merry Pranksters’ efforts blow America’s collective mind. The book has become a must-read for anyone interested in drug culture and late 20th Century American history. It’s where most people go after Catcher In The Rye.

The Pranksters began as a small colony of pharmacological Magellans based in Northern California as Kesey, with all his charisma and inexplicable magnetism, amassed a swelling cult of friends and followers who shared his vision of an enlightened collective consciousness achieved by taking acid. The Merry Pranksters, as they soon called themselves, experimented not only with LSD, but also with sound equipment, video and improvisation to create a whole new breed of sound — acid rock. Hell, the Grateful Dead used to play their acid parties, back when they were still called the Warlocks. The best moments of the book are when they take the party mobile, zig-zagging woozily across the country in a Day-Glo bus, staging large-scale Acid Tests, fucking with the squares, and, above all things, spreading the acid love. Like any good acid trip, Electric Kool-Aid is both illuminating and cosmically confusing, blessedly so. The book jumps erratically between time periods, highlighting the grassroots acid movement’s changes in socio-political attitude, mindset and pecking order as it morphs from a small, select conspiracy to a nationwide phenomenon with far-reaching consequences both great and terrible. But it’s the experience, not the plot, that Wolfe wants the reader to walk away with.

In the course of the 400+ pages, Wolfe never really passes judgment on his subjects, though his fascination with them is obvious. And although Wolfe attended many of the Prankster’s festivities, he never includes himself in the action. I can’t help but wonder if Wolfe ever drank the Kool-Aid, because the novel is a trip in and of itself. Wolfe used his own experiences with the Pranksters, video footage, recordings and Hunter S. Thompson’s personal tapes of the Hell’s Angels, in order to recreate the birth of the psychedelic era — and the effect is an aptly distorted but remarkably tangible odyssey through amorphous looking glass of the LSD culture.

RELATED: Tom Wolfe wrote his new novel, Back to Blood, entirely by hand. But the author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities also says that wasn’t entirely by choice — he’d rather have used a typewriter. “Unfortunately, you can’t keep typewriters going today — you have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked,” Wolfe tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies. “There’s a horrible search to try to find missing parts.” Back to Blood is set in Miami, which Wolfe describes as the only city where an immigrant community rose to dominate the political landscape in just over a generation. The novel deals with racial and ethnic conflict among the city’s diverse inhabitants, including immigrants from Cuba, Haiti and Russia, as well as the city’s long-established African-American and Anglo communities. Its central character, the young Cuban-American police officer Nestor Camacho, struggles with his identity and the ire of his community after safely bringing a Cuban refugee down from the top of a ship’s mast and arresting him before he could set foot on American soil. MORE

BY BRIAN HOWARD Damien Jurado is back. That statement is more literal than figurative. With his brand new album, The Horizon Just Laughed (Secretly Canadian), Jurado—the heart-on-his-sleeve indie folker who’s spent the last two-plus decades honing his signature style of spare, probing songs that are at once hauntingly beautiful and emotionally devastating—has returned to the real world, in a way. Jurado’s three previous albums, starting with 2012’s Maraqopa, were inspired by a dream that took place in a fictional land of the same name. The Horizon Just Laughed, however takes place in much more recognizable locales, with references to familiar places like the Pacific Northwest (where Jurado had long lived)—including the ethereal heartstring-tugger “Over Rainbows and Rainier” (SEE BELOW)—and characters, including Thomas Wolfe, Percy Faith and Ray Conniff. But lovers of Jurado’s strange, alternate-reality wanderings need not fear that Jurado’s just playing it straight. The singer reveals that this album, too, has been inspired by a dream. It features some Billy Pilgrim/Quantum Leap-style time hopping—and deeply Freudian signals about the singer’s eventual move to Los Angeles, which is where Jurado was when Phawker caught up with him via phone ahead of his Sunday gig at Johnny Brenda’s.

PHAWKER: The three albums directly preceding the brand new album were, according to the lore, inspired by a single dream. It’s my understanding that the latest album is also inspired by a dream? How does all of this dream-inspiration stuff work?

DAMIEN JURADO: The dream that inspired this new record is very much a trailer. My dreams are more like trailers, they’re not these long, drawn-out epics. How do I get a trilogy out of a trailer? I have no idea, but I did. My dreams are very snapshot-oriented—sometimes still pictures, sometimes moving pictures—just enough for me to get a grasp on the narrative, if that makes any sense to you.

PHAWKER: I’m following you so far.

DAMIEN JURADO: So, yeah. Man boards plane in nineteen fifty-whatever—or forties—and is bound for a city. He’s the last to get off the plane, and when he gets off, he realizes that he is in a different time period. So, if he takes off in 1956, he’s going to be landing in 1972. If he boards the same plane, he will go to a different location in the United States, and a different era. And he’s having conversations with people he sees on television. He’s having internal dialogue with composers he might know or actors he’s familiar with. The theme of this is that there is no home—home is over. Home is an over concept—he’s never going back. No matter how many planes he boards, no matter who he talks to, he’s never going back. And I think at this point, if this were to happen to me, I’d start to question whether I was even alive or not.

PHAWKER: Are you a Kurt Vonnegut reader?

DAMIEN JURADO: I am not a reader period. I don’t read fiction at all. [laughs]

PHAWKER: I ask because his novel Slaughterhouse-Five features a character, Billy Pilgrim, who is quote-unquote “unstuck in time,” and he hops around through different eras, which is very similar to what you were just describing. Anyway, a lot of the song titles on the record are names of people, like the composer Percy Faith and character actor Marvin Kaplan. Are these people that the protagonist of the dream is popping in on?

DAMIEN JURADO: Well, he’s not popping in on. He’s just sort of talking to them, by way of his own imagination.

PHAWKER: So based on this idea that “home is an over concept,” your song “Thomas Wolfe”… I guess that’s a pretty direct reference to the novelist who famously wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.

DAMIEN JURADO: That is actually a Chevy Chase reference from a 1970s-era Saturday Night Live bit that he did on the SNL news. And he closed out with—I don’t remember what he was even talking about—but he said, ‘Well, I guess Thomas Wolfe was right: You really cannot go home again.’ I do know that that is a Thomas Wolfe reference, but I am referencing Chevy Chase referencing Thomas Wolfe.

PHAWKER: So, I have a question that I thought sounded pretty weird, and I wasn’t sure I was going to ask it, but now that you’ve told me the album’s backstory, I’m asking it. You’ve got a song called “Marvin Kaplan,” and Marvin Kaplan was an actor best known, if he was known at all, for his role as a telephone lineman on the 1970s Linda Lavin sitcom, Alice, which was set in a suburban Phoenix diner. A character named Alice pops up in that song. In the song right after that, “Lou-Jean,” there’s an actual diner and fluorescent skies in a town called Apache, which is a ghost town in Arizona. And the next song is called “Florence-Jean,” which is the full first name of the character on that show, Flo, whose enduring contribution to pop culture is the phrase “kiss my grits.”

DAMIEN JURADO: That’s right.

PHAWKER: So… is this really a three-song arc about the TV show Alice? [laughs]

DAMIEN JURADO: It is not. That is a good question. I love that you’re asking this. So, during the writing of this album, I was watching a shit-ton of television. I don’t watch modern-day TV, most of the TV I watch is from another era, anywhere from the ’50s and going on until the early ’80s; that’s where it kind of ends for me. But yeah, obviously during that period of my writing, I was watching a lot of Alice, and during my watchings of the show, I start to feel a lot of connection happening with what’s happening in my life—also to the character I’m writing about. To give you kind of a backstory, during my upbringing I was moved around from state to state continually; I never had a sense of what home was, ever. And the one thing that remained consistent throughout my childhood was that, whether I was going from Phoenix to Houston, or Houston to Seattle, the shows were consistent, and the characters were consistent. The people and the landscapes and the environment could change, but the shows were my consistency. So, there’s that influence. But during this time, I found that my mind was wandering a lot—to the pay phone inside the diner in the show. Every time it rang, I caught myself wondering if it was me calling the diner. Like some other me. Some sort of parallel-universe-me calling the diner. So, the reality was that part of me realized that this is filmed in a television studio; but there’s another side of me that is not aware of that, where it is very much a reality, and that side doesn’t want to accept the fact that what I’m watching is on a TV show, but me peering into this alternate world. Does that make any sense?

PHAWKER: Yeah.

DAMIEN JURADO: So, I began to really focus in on the extras in the background. Who was that guy getting coffee at the table? What was his name? What was his deal? What’d he do for a living? Was he married? I wonder what his house looks like. I’d go down these rabbit holes, you know. That’s kind of how the Marvin Kaplan-Alice thing took off. I started building narratives around just human episodes.

PHAWKER: Interesting.

DAMIEN JURADO: [laughs].

PHAWKER: [laughing] This interview has gotten more X-Files than I’d expected. So, is this an autobiographical album? Are you the person in this dream?

DAMIEN JURADO: Yes. I’ll say yes to the first question, and to the second, it is me. I wanna say it’s me coming from another time, but it is me. His name isn’t Damien Jurado, I don’t know what his name is.

PHAWKER: But it’s another iteration of you.

DAMIEN JURADO: On the album I reference to him by the name “Q.”

PHAWKER: The song “Over the Rainbows and Rainier” has got to be one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in a while. It’s also got some pretty heavy biblical themes. Is this a song about the end of the world, about Armageddon?

DAMIEN JURADO: You know, yes, in the way that it’s about ending. When I say lines like “We waited for Armageddon to go down,” Armageddon is a very loose term in my mind. It doesn’t mean biblically, it’s more that I’m talking about the shit about to go down. Now here’s what’s crazy: This album, although it was written over a year ago, ended up being very prophetic, and I still can’t wrap my brain around it. You know, the lyric “Over Rainbows and Rainier”; if you asked me two years ago, would I have ever left Washington State, I would have laughed and been like “Oh, hell no!” If you would have said a year ago, “Would you ever move to California, or anywhere else,” I’d be like “Oh, god no.” And that ended up happening, I left. I went over Rainier and I left. It’s funny. When I’ve talked about leaving to go on tour, I’ve always referred to it as “leaving the walls of the Pacific Northwest.” The mountains are pretty much like walls: the Cascades, the Olympics, Rainier, St. Helens: These are all walls to me. This song is me going over the wall.

PHAWKER: It’s almost like you knew, on some level, what was coming.

DAMIEN JURADO: I had no idea it was coming.

PHAWKER: I was thinking that “Over Rainbows and Rainier” almost sounds like a metaphor for death, or going to “Heaven.” With that in mind, there’s also a lot of bleak imagery in “The Last Great Washington State”: The building’s on fire, the sky gets turned off like a light. And you ask, “What good is living if you can’t write your ending?” It does sound very much like a goodbye.

DAMIEN JURADO: It is. And what’s crazy is that I didn’t even know it. You know, when I’m confronted with a line that says, “What good is living if you can’t write your ending,” I’m telling you, man, to even say that line, it really hits me emotionally, because I believe that’s true. Really. What the fuck is the point? There’s a line in the song: “You’re always in doubt of the truths you’re defending”? God, yeah, that is me, that was me. I always had to defend everything I was thinking or feeling. … This time last year I started watching these self-help videos, and some of these people were motivational speakers, like Tony Robbins and Les Brown. And they all have the exact same question: What is it that you want out of your life? Are you living the life that you want to live? And I just kept saying, “No, I’m not.” Now, if I’m saying no, well then what is it that you want? And even if you don’t know what you want, even if you have a smidgen of what you want, walk in that direction, and take a chance.

PHAWKER: So, you’re in California now. Was it the step you needed to take to live the life you wanted to be living?

DAMIEN JURADO: You know, that’s a very complex answer. All I can say about it is… I’ll say this: Love brought me to California. Love for my own life, for my own sanity, love for another person. Love. That’s what brought me to California, which I think is very big and powerful.

PHAWKER: Absolutely. In the song, “Percy Faith,” there’s a lot of angst about, to put it broadly, how things are and where things are going, which feels like a part of this personal journey you’re describing. You talk about rioting in the street, you talk about Seattle trademarking the rain. How people never look you in the eye, there’s no need to talk, the sidewalks walk for you. What does Percy Faith signify for you in this?

DAMIEN JURADO: This isn’t just Percy Faith. In this song, I’m talking about people like Allan Sherman, I’m talking about Ray Conniff, and these are people, in my opinion, that when we’re talking about the greats in music, we’re so quick—and honestly, it’s so cliché—even if deservedly [to worship] The Beatles, The Beach Boys, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, xyz blah blah blah, who cares? We’re not talking about innovators. And you know what’s funny? If you ask—and I know this for a fact because I’ve seen these interviews—if you talk to people like Brian Wilson, Brian Wilson will tell you, first and foremost, he is taking cues from people like Ray Conniff, like Percy Faith, like Mantovani, like Henry Mancini. It wasn’t Phil Spector. Phil Spector was of his time, no doubt about it. But, Brian Wilson was very much inspired by these very modern-day pop arrangers. And you can listen—you can put on a Ray Conniff record and be like “Oh, I get it. I now understand where the fuck he was going with Pet Sounds, or Smile, because this all makes sense now.” Now, on the flip-side of that, the commentary that I’m talking about with Seattle’s made a trademark on the rain, that’s a direct reference to Amazon. People never look you in the eye, obviously a smart phone thing. Sidewalks that walk for themselves: airports, escalators, you name it. Because of the Internet, I know everything, but yet I don’t know the guy who works at the corner store that I go to every damn day of my life.

PHAWKER: Having spent three records telling the Maraqopa story, was it liberating to make a record outside of that story arc?

DAMIEN JURADO: Yes, it was. I recently told this journalist working for the Foreign Press that it’s funny because me and the protagonist of Maraqopa have something in common, which is [that] we stayed there too long. We weren’t supposed to be there that long. I did, and it made me unhealthy. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than that I stayed there too long, so to move on, finally leave and sort of move away from that is very liberating.

PHAWKER: Why did you move around so much growing up?

DAMIEN JURADO: A lot of it, honestly, man, had to do with family circumstances. I basically had a father who wasn’t very present in my life, and a mother who wanted to chase him around the country. And during that time, neither of them could decide on a career, what the hell they wanted to do. My parents are polar opposites, but the one thing they have in common is that they are very nomadic. They love to move around, on the drop of a dime, and nothing’s going to hold them back. The trait that I pick up from them is determination. Once they decide something, good luck getting them to waver on their decision. If my mom or my dad decided, “All right. I’m moving to Arizona next week,” that’s what we did. Middle of the school year, goodbye everybody, see you later, have a nice life, see you never, you know, I’m moving to Phoenix. And then, the next year again, mid-school-year, “Hey, I’m going to go to law school in Houston.” All right, goodbye everybody, see you never, moving to Houston. And it was repeating itself over and over and over again.

PHAWKER: You were in Seattle for a good while, am I correct?

DAMIEN JURADO: Thirty-three years.

PHAWKER: Do you think that you stayed in the same place that long as a reaction to that?

DAMIEN JURADO: That’s a good question. I don’t know why. How about this for an answer: When you spend your whole life moving around all the time, you want to finally just stop. And for me, with as much moving as I did, not just from state to state, but within the state I was living—take Arizona, for instance: we lived in Surprise, then Glendale, then Phoenix. We’re going to move to Seattle, Washington, and then we’re going to move to Grays Harbor, and then we’re going to move back to Seattle. So that is basically my existence. I didn’t know it was always looking for that place to land and say, “Enough is enough. I just can’t do this shit anymore.” But I can say I’m home now.

Former Obama administration speechwriter/screenwriter/comedian Jon Lovett brings his popular Lovett Or Leave It podcast to the Merriam Theater on Sunday for a live taping, with local guests Franchesca Ramsey and Dylan Marron on the panel and actor Ezra Miller’s band Sons of an Illustrious Father on hand to play the theme song. We got Lovett on the phone earlier this week to talk about happier times in Obama White House, coping with the darkness of Trump, rookie mistakes in Hollywood, how you explain to your parents that upon graduating college with a math degree you plan to become a stand-up comedian.

PHAWKER: You graduated from Williams College in 2004 with a degree in math. Your senior thesis was Rotating Linkages in a Normed Plane. As someone who barely got past Algebra, could you sort of break that down for me in twenty-five words or less roughly what that means?

JON LOVETT: Sure, basically it’s about how things behave when the length of an object changes based on the direction it’s pointing. So an example would be like if you were navigating the streets of Manhattan, it’s a grid. So if you want to go a mile north, you go a mile north. If you want to go a mile east, you go a mile east. If you want to go a mile northeast, you have to zigzag your way there so you have to travel a bit more to get there. So it’s about how when things behave differently depending on the direction you’re pointing has an effect on the geometry of shapes.

PHAWKER: So upon graduation you promptly applied a mathematics degree to the only logical profession which would be stand-up. How do you explain this to you parents?

JON LOVETT: We had a bargain, an unspoken bargain, which was I was temping as a paralegal during the day and going to open mics at night, but I was also applying to law school.

PHAWKER: But then you became an Obama White House speechwriter because, according to online reports, you won some kind of contest? Can you explain that? Did they just pick your name out of a hat?

JON LOVETT: No, so here’s what it was. They solicited a lot of different people and they submitted writing samples and resumes and from that group they picked a bunch of people to write a test speech. Then they kind of read them anonymously so they could just compare based on the work. Mine was one of those anonymous speeches they picked from that group.

PHAWKER: What was your best day in the White House and worst day in the White House?

JON LOVETT: You know I would say the best day was definitely around the passage of healthcare. That was such a hard fight, it was something everybody so thoroughly believed in, there were so many twists and turns to it happening, from the death of Ted Kennedy and the election of Scott Brown to the way the bill moved through the Senate and the House, and then it finally culminated in passage of a bill that people had been fighting for, for I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say a century. So that was the most exciting and best experience and some of the moments I most remember from being a speechwriter were speeches around healthcare. Standing in the room when he signed that bill and also being on the trail when he was making the case for it. Worst day, I don’t know I’d have to think about it. I feel a little bit removed from the true—you know look, the president deals with incredibly heart-wrenching and difficult situations around foreign policy, around life and death, around natural disasters, around murders and mass shootings. So I don’t know if it would be—I don’t know what you would point to and be this was the worst day. I remember there were some pretty dark days around the BP oil spill where there was a sense of like, why isn’t the president fixing this? And it’s like well, he’s not at the bottom of the ocean. There were lots of moments, you know, the first few years of the Obama administration, when I was there, were defined by overlapping crises.

PHAWKER: Yeah, exactly. Moving forward, lessons learned from your tenure in Hollywood doing 1600 Penn and working on HBO’s The Newsroom. If you had to do over, you would do it differently. Sorry these questions are so vague.

JON LOVETT: I would say for 1600 Penn, one thing that I learned from that experience is there’s a real similarity between speechwriting and screenwriting in that a lot of it is not just about writing, a lot of it is about figuring out how to maintain your creative and your voice and vision as you’re pursuing something. And I think one thing that I learned through the process with 1600 Penn was, I think that was a really funny show but I’d never worked in TV before, I’d never written a TV script before, I’d never been on a set before so there was so many things I was doing for the first time and I think one thing you learn in that process is what matters and what doesn’t, where should you fight and where should you let things go. I think I just have a different perspective on that now. I really liked 1600 Penn but I was a much more adept TV writer at the end of that experience than I was at the beginning.

PHAWKER: Explain the premise of Lovett or Leave It…

JON LOVETT: Lovett or Leave It is this panel show, we talk about the week’s news, we make fun of cable news, we make fun of whatever crazy stuff has happened that week. We do it in front of a live audience and then we rant about topics that have been bothering us and it’s a fun way to get a week’s worth of news that can often be pretty dispiriting in a more entertaining way.

PHAWKER: Speaking as an Obama administration alumnus, how do you cope with the Trump presidency?

JON LOVETT: Look, I read the news every day, I feel like I’m in this privileged position that we started this company because we wanted to talk about politics the way we actually talk and we wanted to engage people, wanted to help people figure out how to get involved and make a difference and that’s partly why we do these live shows, we get people involved. I also just think at a certain point, there will be dinners where I’ll be like, we’re not going to talk about politics because I’m all set today, we talked about it a lot today and I don’t need to talk about it anymore. I think its about not losing sight of the fact that what’s happening is wrong and what’s happening in our politics is dangerous and we have to fight it, while at the same time not losing sight of the fact that you can’t lose yourself in it and you can’t forget about all the other good and important things in life because we’re in this for a long fight. We’re in a fight against a really terrible group of people, some of whom earnestly believe in the project Trump has set about implementing, some who are cynically exploiting Trump because they’re ambitious, or they want to make money or they have an ideological agenda, but this combination of fools and zealots and craven people are doing real damage to this country and it’s heartbreaking. Heartbreaking to see how many people have capitulated, heartbreaking to see the racism in and misogyny given quarter by the Republican party but even as we go through this collective crises, we can’t be exhausted by it because that’s what they want. If we give up, if we get too disheartened, if we get too cynical, we’ll lose. That’s partly why we do these shows, why we do Lovett or Leave It is because it’s okay to take a break and its okay to laugh a little about the things that are so depraved and awful.

PHAWKER: Last question: Knowing what we know to date, what is your theory as to what the Mueller investigation will reveal when all is said and done?

JON LOVETT: So I’m not going to speculate about that because we’re out of the prediction business — a lesson learned the hard way in 2016. But I will say, that I am interested. Donald Trump is a cynical liar and bullshit artist who maintains no coherent worldview whatsoever. However, he is consistent on a few things. One of them is racism and misogyny. One of them is being anti-trade and anti-immigration. And the other is being extraordinarily solicitous and deferential to Russia. That defies explanation based on what we currently know, but not based on what we could learn from Mueller. I have no idea. What has been clear for the past year is that Mueller knows more than us and he knows it well ahead of us. What we have tended to learn are small pieces of information that Mueller has had from us. So I have absolutely no idea, they run a tight ship, what we know has come out of the Mueller investigation has not come from Mueller himself or his team but through witnesses who have spoken to the grand jury, through Trump lawyers, through others who have had access to the investigation one way or another. I am most interested in understanding Donald Trump’s finances. I think the Washington Post and New York Times have begun elucidating that with the steady flow of cash from Donald Trump into businesses around the world to the strange kind of scheming operation of his lawyer Michael Cohen. So I think we don’t fully know but that to me is what I want to understand more of, Donald Trump’s finances, how it works and what connection it has to Trump’s strange deference to Russia.

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Ryan Reynolds returns as everyone’s favorite Merc with a mouth in Deadpool 2, one of the most anticipated blockbusters of the summer. The first installment of turned the superhero genre on its head with its hard-R, low budget take on the fan favorite character that was known for not only his miraculous regenerative abilities, but his penchant for breaking the fourth wall, providing a bizarre meta-commentary on the comic book world. With original director Tim Miller walking away from the sequel due to “creative differences,” we have David Leitch (John Wick,Atomic Blonde) settling into the director’s chair.

This time around Deadpool is tasked with protecting Russell (AKA Firefist) a troubled young mutant from Cable (Josh Brolin), an unstoppable super soldier from the future. Cable believes killing Russell is the only way to save his family from their predestined fate. Deadpool’s girlfriend Vanessa is once again dispatched early on in the film and to save the day Deadpool has to put forth maximum effort and form his own super hero squad, X-Force to thwart Cable. While the first film hilariously deconstructed the superhero origin story this film tackles the tropes and conventions of Marvel’s multi-hero extended universe films. Of course, if you’ve read the comics you know Cable and Deadpool eventually team up, and in this film they are forced to put aside their differences by the third act to to take on a big bad that threatens all of human and mutant kind. This third act twist highlights the misdirection that filmmakers have begun to employ, thanks to toxicity of comic book fandom and its strange compulsion to spoil and dismiss a film, before its even hits the theater.

Deadpool 2 feels at times a bit too derivative of the original with its fractured narrative and recycled gimmicks that riff on Hollywood’s bigger-is-always-better approach to superhero sequels. The filmmakers wisely use this framework as a springboard to blow open Deadpool’s world, expanding the scope of the original’s low-budget universe to rival Disney’s own Marvel offerings. The film’s script, while lacking some of the original’s nuance, does up the ante with a constant stream of densely-layered in-jokes and meta-references that are simply impossible to consume whole in a single viewing. While Deadpool 2 definitely delivers more laughs than the original, it does feel a bit overwhelming at times, and laughing too hard could result in missing something possibly relevant to the plot or the next joke. While the first film did a better job of balancing the action set pieces and the laugh lines, Deadpool 2 goes straight for the laughs. (While the post credit sequence joke is one of the best of its kind it also brings into question the entire narrative of the film as Deadpool does some time traveling of his own.)

Deadpool 2’s screenplay wisely sidesteps Cable’s convoluted back-story to focus on bringing together X-Force and setting up Deadpool as the best thing Fox currently has going Marvel-wise. Reynolds is back in his element and isn’t afraid to be completely self-deprecating when it benefits the punch line or a deliver a gross out gag if it will get a laugh. For instance, Deadpool 2’s take on the baby hand gag is something that can’t be unseen, but probably should be. On the upside, Brolin is just pure badass and gives Deadpool the straight man he deserves, while also delivering a formable physical presence as the no nonsense half man/half cyborg. While most people probably assume, judging by the trailer, that Peter’s everyman is going steal the show, but that honor goes to Zazie Beetz’s Domino, whose superpower is good luck. It’s no secret that the camera loves her and every moment she’s on screen her effortless charm and charisma makes her the center of attention. The film also features one of the best blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos of the summer, giving Matt Damon’s brief turn in Thor: Ragnarok a run for its money for sheer brevity.

The thing that surprised me most about the original Deadpool was the sheer re-watchablity of it; catching it on cable when it was in heavy rotation I found the film easy to pick up and impossible to put down. While it still remains to be seen if the newest entry will enjoy that same bottomless replay value I do know I have to see it again if only to catch the jokes I was too busy laughing to get the first time around. Suffice it to say if you liked Deadpool, Deadpool 2 will likely be the funniest film you see all summer.

Noel Gallgher always understood the importance of being obvious — fist-pumping guitar chords, stadium rattling bass lines, bobblehead-inducing drum beats, simple-Simon ‘moon in June’ rhymes that sound like Shakespeare to the besotted ears of soccer hooligans everywhere when bleated through the clenched teeth of his brother Liam’s gloriously feral Lennon-esque whine — which is why Oasis went champagne supernova in the mid-90s and ruled Britannia for the better part of the decade. Massive egos and sibling rivalry — aggravated by oceans of lager and mounds of cocaine the size of the Peruvian Andes — along with the inevitable bursting of the Britpop bubble finally put a period on the end of Oasis saga in 2009. The Brothers Gallagher split off into competing solo projects (Noel’s High Flying Birds and Liam’s now-disbanded Beady Eye), trashing each other in the press before forging an uneasy truce that finds both monetizing the Oasis legacy with new solo albums near-annually and ensuing tours. Which is what brings dear Liam to the Festival Pier tomorrow night, on the Philly stop of a co-headling tour with ex-Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft for the benefit of true believers, 90s nostalogists and newbies that missed it the first time. We have a pair of tix to give away to some lucky duck Phawker reader. To qualify to win, all you have to do is 1.) sign up for our mailing list. (Located above right, just below the masthead. Trust us, this is something you want to do. In addition to breaking news alerts and Phawker updates, you also get advanced warning about groovy concert ticket giveaways and other free swag opportunities like this one!) 2) After signing up, send us an email at PHAWKER66@GMAIL.COM telling us a much, with the words BE HERE NOW in the subject line AND the correct answer to the following Oasis trivia question: Who is Guigsy? Please include your full name and a mobile number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed!

]]>http://www.phawker.com/2018/05/16/win-tix-to-see-liam-gallagher-the-festival-pier/feed/0NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’thttp://www.phawker.com/2018/05/16/npr-4-the-deaf-we-hear-it-even-when-u-cant-100/
http://www.phawker.com/2018/05/16/npr-4-the-deaf-we-hear-it-even-when-u-cant-100/#commentsWed, 16 May 2018 17:19:07 +0000http://www.phawker.com/?p=99429

FRESH AIR: Author Michael Pollan had always been curious about psychoactive plants, but his interest skyrocketed when he heard about a research study in which people with terminal cancer were given a psychedelic called psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — to help them deal with their distress. “This seemed like such a crazy idea that I began looking into it,” Pollan says. “Why should a drug from a mushroom help people deal with their mortality?” Pollan, whose previous books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense Of Food, started researching different experimental therapeutic uses of psychedelics, and found that the drugs were being used to treat depression, addiction and the fear of death. Then he decided to go one step further: A self-described “reluctant psychonaut,” Pollan enlisted guides to help him experiment with LSD, psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT, a substance in the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. Each of Pollan’s experiences with psychedelics was proceeded by worry and self-doubt. But, he says, “I realized later that was my ego trying to convince me not to do this thing that was going to challenge my ego.” Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, recounts his experiences with the drugs and also examines the history of psychedelics as well as their possible therapeutic uses. MORE

NEW YORK TIMES: As a freshman at SUNY Buffalo, Terry Gross wanted to write. But she was worried she wasn’t good enough to be great, and she struggled to find a subject. At the same time, she was shedding her ‘‘good girl’’ identity. She tried being a hippie — ‘‘I was too inhibited to be very convincing at it. And too Sheepshead Bay, probably’’ — and she tried drugs. One of the first times she dropped LSD, she determinedly brought along paper and pen: ‘‘I’m going to have a subject,’’ she recalls thinking. ‘‘All of my writerly inhibitions are going to open up, and my talent is going to be released!’’ LSD didn’t help her writing, but for Gross it was a beneficially ‘‘immersive experience.’

In the first months after she graduated in 1972, Gross floundered. She had married, but would soon divorce; she was fired from a job teaching eighth grade after only six weeks (she couldn’t control the class). But then she discovered radio. One afternoon, about a year after she finished school, she was sitting in her house in Buffalo listening to ‘‘Womanpower,’’ a feminist program on WBFO, the university station. One of her roommates was a guest, and she came out as gay on the air. Gross was surprised by the revelation, but more so by the way her roommate had delivered it: sitting before a microphone in a radio studio. Gross, who had wanted to do ‘‘something in media’’ but hadn’t known how to begin, was intrigued. Through her roommate, she learned there was an opening on ‘‘Womanpower,’’ and Gross started on the show as a volunteer. MORE

The polls are open from 7 AM to 8 PM. By law in Philadelphia, anyone in line at 8 pm has to be given the chance to vote not matter how long the line. Here is a list of your rights and responsibilities as a registered voter. Vote hard!

RECCOMENDED: The Committee of Seventy’s Digital Ballot Tool is back for the May 15, 2018 Primary. Powered by CivicEngine and a product of BallotReady, the tool allows voters to compile their candidate choices and ballot question answers before heading to the polls. Give it a try and share with your network.

Few bands have pulled off such a consistently strong, decades-long discography as sludge-metal legends The Melvins. Throwing down hard since their ’86 debut, Deep Six, their latest, the just-released Pinkus Abortion Technician, is no exception. Named after the Butthole Surfers’ infamous 1987 album, Locust Abortion Technician, Pinkus Abortion Technician delivers five original tracks and three covers, including The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The album’s title is not the only element borrowed from Butthole Surfers. As the title suggests, former Surfers bassist and songwriter, Jeff Pinkus, joined forces with The Melvins to write and record Pinkus Abortion Technician and take it on the road. I had the pleasure to experience The Melvins Thursday night at Underground Arts, where head Melvin, Buzz Osborne, looked like a space warlock in this black, Snuggy-esque, cosmos-themed, turtle-necked robe, with his weightless gray afro lazily trailing the motions of his head. Both he and Pinkus played the fabled Travis Bean instruments (other notable Travis-Bean-players include Jerry Garcia, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Efrim Menuck, and Mac Demarco), with Travis Bean speaker cabinets to match. Ongoing Melvins bassist, Shane McDonald (yes, two bassists on stage) donned a blood-spattered black suit and made crazy eyes at me from stage-left when he wasn’t jumping around. Thursday night’s set was a healthy blend of oldies, like “Honey Bucket” and “At a Crawl,” as well as their latest, which I thoroughly enjoyed: the darkly comical “Stop Moving to Florida” and the hauntingly spellbinding “Don’t Forget to Breath.” Pinkus created wacky radio frequencies during song transitions, and those brief moments were the only periods of moshpit cessation. Look, I enjoy large, sweaty men body-checking me and spilling PBR in my face as much as the next guy, but truth be told I prefer enjoying my sludge in stillness — sonic-pummeling over body-pummeling. But, I suppose not every crowd can be a Swans crowd. Aside from an occasional respite from the relentless moshing, the only other thing that would have made this show better is an encore. Those impatient Philly crowds, man. They booked it to the exit as soon as the band put down their instruments, save for one devout fan at the front chanting “One more song!” three times before succumbing to the silence that ensued. – KYLE WEINSTEIN

A Queen biopic with Mr. Robot‘s Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury? We are so there. Opens November 2nd.

BILLBOARD: After a 10-second teaser trailer dropped on Monday (May 14), briefly revealing star Rami Malek in his Mercury get up, the full trailer proved that the Mr. Robot actor was the only choice that made sense. Malek has already earned praise for his uncanny resemblance to Mercury, and the blitz of scenes in which he inhabits the flamboyant rock star in a variety of colorful outfits and through multiple hair eras is evidence that the wait was worth it. The trailer opens with Malek, wearing a fluttering white cape, engaging in the familiar call-and-response with an audience that was one of Queen’s signature live concert staple moves, before cutting to snippets of Malek as Mercury in a gold lame jumpsuit, a black leather outfit and shirtless while wielding the late singer’s iconic half microphone stand as the instantly recognizable strains of “Another One Bites the Dust” kick in. The quick-cut trailer bounces from Mercury’s first meeting with guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) to their rise through the ranks while the “Dust” beat is overlaid with snippets of other hits, including “Killer Queen” and the movie’s title track. It peaks with a scene in which May plays the central “Rhapsody” riff in the studio and Mercury informs him from the mixing board “this is where the operatic section comes in,” which cuts to the band huddled around a microphone bringing Mercury unlikely musical vision to fruition. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: I’m driving Stephen Malkmus’ car. In America, that’s tantamount to possessing someone’s soul. But wait, it gets better: I’m listening to Slanted And Enchanted—make that Malkmus’ copy of Slanted And Enchanted—and it sounds great as I tool down the sun-kissed streets of Portland, Ore., with the windows down and the stereo up. There’s a parking ticket flapping beneath the windshield wiper—and it bores me. I look around at all the people, and I just don’t care. Not a care, really, in the world. I am, for a moment, Stephen Malkmus, fortunate son. Listen to me, I’m on the stereo.

Actually, I’m driving Malkmus’ girlfriend’s car. Which you would know is even better if you’ve ever seen his girlfriend. Her name is Heather Larimer, and she’s beautiful and bright and 28. She was a cheerleader and she has a master’s degree in creative writing—a major-league summer babe (AOL Keyword: Babia Majora). By the time you read this, you may have already seen her singing in Malkmus’ new band, the Jicks. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up.

I’m driving Malkmus’ girlfriend’s car because I’ve come to Portland to find out what it means to be Stephen Malkmus (AOL Keyword: Laconic), and the first thing he wants to do is get a friggin’ battery for his car. It’s a 1989 Acura Legend, and it’s been stranded for months in front of his former apartment up in the rich, old-money part of town. Up here, on this faintly Olympian perch where even modest homes list for $300,000, we sit waiting for the AAA guy. Malkmus, the man Courtney Love called “the Grace Kelly of indie rock,” doesn’t want to be interviewed yet, and it isn’t like I know him from Adam; for that matter, after spending three days with him, I will still not really know him from Adam. Aside from a bit of strained small talk, my first half hour or so in the company of one of indie rock’s most acclaimed wordsmiths is spent in silence, watching him clean out his trunk. A soggy copy of an old income-tax form. A Thin Lizzy album. A rumpled suit bag and battered dress shoes, probably last worn to the funeral of his friend Robert Bingham (author of a collection of short stories called Pure Slaughter Value and heir to a publishing fortune). Bingham died from a heroin overdose in the fall of 1999. “I don’t think he was really that into it,” Malkmus will tell me later. “I think he just tried it with this girl … ” The rest of the thought trails off in deference to the privacy of the dead. MORE

GEORGE WILL: Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. His chief of staff, Reince Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for the “blessing” of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla of insincerity. Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price. Before Price’s ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, “I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me.” The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: “I’m deeply humbled. . . . ” Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin.

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong. Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act.Noting that Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by Arpaio’s presence, and praised him as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. MORE

BY BRIAN HOWARD When tUnE-yArDs, the musical project of Merril Garbus, broke out in 2011 with the mesmerizing album w h o k i l l— a jittery, skronking mash up of acoustic and electronic, funk, soul and Afro-pop—it was a revelation. It felt especially fresh, making all the year-end lists, and topping the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll. But a lot has changed in the world since then, and a white woman from New England playing African beats is received a little differently now. In the intervening years, Garbus has weathered criticism for her liberal cribbing from the Afro-pop songbook she so loves, and on her new, dance-music-inspired album, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, addresses many of those issues head-on. In interviews ahead of the release, Garbus has talked a lot about the personal work she’s engaged in, grappling with issues of privilege, appropriation, her own whiteness, and what they mean in her life and in her music. The new record feels very much the work of a person in the depths of some tough self-analysis. For a record with such infectious grooves, the ride gets more than a little bumpy—appropriately, given the odd times we’re living in. Oakland-based Garbus and bandmate Nate Brenner hit Union Transfer on Thursday. We caught up with Garbus and asked her about the right way to pay homage to Ladysmith Black Mambazo, touring through Trump country, how to evolve and dancing at the end of the world. We caught up with Garbus the morning after Game 3 of the Sixers/Miami Heat series. Turns out she’s an NBA fan.

MERRILL GARBUS: Did the 76ers win?

PHAWKER: We did win, yeah!

MERRILL GARBUS: [laughing] Congratulations!

PHAWKER: Thank you! Yeah, Joel Embiid returned to the lineup, so that was very… we’re all really excited about that. We missed him. Are you a basketball fan?

MERRILL GARBUS: I am, yeah. We’ve been watching all that lately.

PHAWKER: Who’s your team?

MERRILL GARBUS: The Warriors. I mean it’s so unlike me not to root for the underdog, but I’ve lived here long enough that, you know, I saw them come up from nothing to champions, so yeah… Still a Warrior’s fan. Nate’s a Pacer’s fan, Indiana, so I’m also a secret Pacers fan.

PHAWKER: There’s an off-key piano note within the first few seconds of “Heart Attack,” the very first song on the new album; that strikes me as significant. That note seems to be saying quite a bit. I was hoping you could talk a bit about what it means, both to the record and maybe about life right now.

MERRILL GARBUS: Thank you for noticing that. [laughing] It’s funny ‘cause I think “Heart Attack” was one of those tunes that, in my struggle to understand and to eventually embrace four-on-the-floor dance music, it was a kind of song that I hadn’t written before, and I guess the “wrong note” is the Tune-Yards-y part, the dissonant part. What I don’t appreciate about a lot of other pop music is… there’s no dissonance, there’s a kind of, “Everything is okay. Everything’s rosy in here” [vibe] but everything is not okay. I love when music reflects that. I think that certainly there’s a lot of contemporary pop—specifically hip-hop and R&B music that does have those dissonant moments in it. But, thanks for bringing attention to it, because I think you’re right. We were starting the album with a song that was like the most generic lyrically. It’s the least pointed. It could be about the end of a relationship. It could be about the world. It could be about anything—and I want it to be that way for people. But the dissonant note felt really important so that it wasn’t just a generic candy pop tune.

PHAWKER: On the song “Coast to Coast” you seem to be grappling pretty openly with the divided country we find ourselves in right now. There’s fear in there. There’s what feels like an army marching, and then there’s the line “We let freedom ring, but whose freedom?” There’s a lot of disillusionment in the world right now, and I feel like there’s a bit of that in the song, as well. How do you think we make sure everyone’s freedom rings going forward?

MERRILL GARBUS: Work at it really hard. I was listening to this radio show on climate change last night as I was driving home—you know, driving home, burning fossil fuel—and one of the points that Paul Ehrlich—he’s the author of the 1968 book Population Bomb—suggested was that we actually have to evolve in order to make it, like, we have to evolve into organisms that are not so sight-oriented because we can’t always visually see the danger of climate change. I think we have to evolve to withstand discomfort a lot more. I feel pessimistic about our capacity as humans to evolve on purpose. We might be forced to evolve. We have to work really hard on ourselves and also on our society. I think the optimistic part is that a lot of people have taken that work on—as I’ve heard said around here in activist circles, “Get in where you fit in.” Do the things that feel the most accessible to you and that you’re the most passionate about, and then work on them. And a whole lot more listening. I think we need to be ready to listen to what we might not want to hear.

PHAWKER: On on the song “ABC 123” there’s that line “Sitting in the middle of the sixth extinction.” There are moments in the song where there’s this sense of the world is burning, so we might as well dance, and other moments where the uplift feels like a rallying cry. I read a story about how you were DJing the night of the election, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about dancing and writing dance music as the world is crumbling.

MERRILL GARBUS: The world is crumbling, to me, from my perspective, but that’s a very limited perspective, an American, Western and white American perspective that we… you know, I’m saying “us,” as if you’re like me, but I don’t know; so I’m going to say “us” as in NPR listeners and climate change believers, scientists. There is this perspective that I just assumed is a monolithic perspective. Something that was really illuminating to me around the election, I was doing a lot of racial justice work and just coming to understand that there are a lot of people who feel like the world has been crumbling for a long time. There are a lot of people who have been dealing with their lives feeling threatened on a daily basis for a very long time. So it opens this window for me that maybe I don’t know everything. I have a really deep belief that it’s healing and joy and pleasure that will give us the tools to be resilient in these times… like, no matter what, we have to keep celebrating what we have; if we don’t celebrate what we have, we’ll take it for granted. If I don’t celebrate life, then I’ll take life for granted.

PHAWKER: There’s a line in “Who Are You?” that really struck a chord with me. It’s that line “Communion is old, but what makes a community whole.” I grew up Catholic, and I stopped practicing the moment I went to college. And now I’m fortysomething with a one-year-old daughter, and even though religion still doesn’t resonate with me, I find myself wistful for the idea of having a place where everyone in the community goes once a week, to see people that you don’t see in your day-to-day life. Is that the idea behind that line? And if so, what do you think is or could be a replacement for that sort of meeting place in a world where there’s a lot of disconnect in our communities?

MERRILL GARBUS: It feels like to me like it’s an opportunity lost in terms of organized religion. There’s not a whole lot of trust in organized religion anymore, at least in many parts of the world. There’s all the blind trust in it for some other people. I’m really wondering about that, because I think I’ve definitely found it somewhat in organizing in activist circles. You know, like I was really glad to take these workshops in the buddhist community about privilege… white privilege and about whiteness and how it separates us.

PHAWKER: So in the songs “Then Is Now” and “Colonizer” and in some others as well, you address the kind of tricky theme of cultural appropriation, which is something you’ve confronted in your own back catalog. W h o k i l l owes quite a bit to African musical traditions, and it’s clearly music that appeals to you. How have you come to confront influence in your songwriting? Do you find yourself editing yourself if you feel like you’re using something that isn’t yours to use?

MERRILL GARBUS: I think it’s a big old question mark. By which I mean, I don’t think there are answers necessarily, but I do think that there are real things to consider. For instance, I asked myself, ‘How can I give credit where credit is due? How can I pass the mic?’ as in, ‘How can I draw attention to people who are not often given opportunities in this world?’, which is really, you know, we are living in white supremacy. It sounds so drastic, I think, sometimes, to say it that way, but it’s just true. So, how do I pass the mic to others who don’t usually get the mic? And then financially, you know, I lifted something from Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which felt very karmic somehow, being influenced by Paul Simon and Graceland. The line “Reveal yourself, reveal yourself” on “Private Life,” comes right from their song “King of Kings.” Just to credit them and to pay them royalties felt like doing it the right way. That’s the right way. But I feel like cultural appropriation just is. It’s happening all the time. Jack White doesn’t talk a lot about cultural appropriation, but he’s the total cultural appropriator,. And he has his own way of paying homage, but I find him problematic at times, too. I find Justin Timberlake problematic, and I love his music. So, I think we as white musicians, who are influenced by black music, we are problematic. And as with everything having to do with culture and race and society, there’s no real clear or clean answer, but I really do believe that there is intention, and there is being courageous, and there is letting go of our egos enough to admit when we’re wrong, or when we’re causing harm.

PHAWKER: What are some examples ways that you’ve passed the mic?

MERRILL GARBUS: One is this radio show that I do, C.L.A.W., where I get to interview women and play the music of female-identifying producers and rappers. I feel like rap is an art form that has always been exactly that: people taking the mic and expressing their truths, and that was why this particular project was really fulfilling to me. And I would say also in who we choose to amplify, bringing them on the road with us. … An important motivation for me is to create more connections and relationships with musicians who are different than me and are telling different stories than me. Music is this incredible opportunity for that because musicians have music in common, and that can be a real lubricant for some of these really difficult conversations that I think we do need to have.

PHAWKER: I noticed there are a lot of dates on your tour that are in what I guess you would call “red states.” Was that intentional? A little “coastal elite” bubble bursting?

MERRILL GARBUS: No, it wasn’t… I mean we always try to get to as much of the country as we can. So I hadn’t really thought about it that way. But maybe that’s why the ticket sales are so low in Houston [laughs]. Nate’s from Indiana, and I’ve got a lot of family in Kentucky. I’ve always had a complicated attitude towards liberal and conservative, just because of where I come from. I really do believe that the majority of human beings want the same thing. We want peace, and we want shelter. And we want to be fed, and we want safety for our loved ones. Something that we’ve always loved doing, and always tried to do is not just be New York and L.A., even though, absolutely that’s where our largest fans are, on the coasts. We gotta talk to each other, so that means bringing California to Nebraska.